1. Field of the Invention
The present invention pertains to the art of refrigerators and, more particularly, to an adjustable retainer assembly for maintaining food containers in a desired storage condition upon a shelf provided on an interior portion of a refrigerator door.
2. Discussion of the Prior Art
It is well known in the art to form refrigerator doors with inner liners which incorporate a plurality of shelves upon which various food containers may be stored. These shelves are often designed to hold narrow containers, such as wine bottles or salad dressings. Most often, a refrigerator door shelf will be provided with an associated front wall or a cross bar such that, when the refrigerator door is abruptly opened, the front wall of the shelf will serve as a retainer and prevent any forward motion of the food container. Thus, the front wall would prevent undesirable movement of the container upon the shelf, thereby hindering any tipping over of the food container.
Recently, refrigerator shelves have been made much deeper than in the past in order to acconmmodate much wider and taller containers, such as large mayonnaise jars or one gallon milk jugs. In a manner similar to prior known arrangements, the shelf has an associated front wall or cross bar which prevents fore-to-aft movement of the containers in order to prevent the containers from falling off the shelf when the refrigerator door is opened. However, when a rather tall and narrow food container is placed on the same shelf, the front wall of the shelf cannot prevent a substantial amount of fore-to-aft movement of the container. Thus, such containers will be prone to toppling over, spilling and perhaps even breaking when the refrigerator door is abruptly opened.
In an attempt to solve this known problem, it is heretofore been proposed to attach additional retaining structure to the refrigerator door liner itself. Such retaining structures, typically taking the form of retaining bars, are used to effectively change the depth of the shelf by applying pressure to an upper portion of the food container, thus holding the container in place when the refrigerator door is opened. U.S. Pat. No. 5,567,029 discloses various retainer arrangements, each including a removable retainer element mounted to the inner liner of a refrigerator door and capable of being pivoted to adapt modern deep refrigerator door shelves for use with varying food container sizes. More specifically, in accordance with this patented arrangement, a retainer bar can be pivoted to various discreet positions relative to the liner, while being maintained in a desired position by cooperating with detent structure. Although this known prior art solves numerous problems encountered with deep refrigerator shelves, the adjustable retainer assembly still has certain drawbacks. Primarily, the number of positions in which the bar can be retained is preset and therefore limited.
Based on the above, it would be desirable to have an adjustable retainer assembly which can be set in a substantially infinite number of positions such that it could be adjusted to a selected position dedicated to the specific size of the food container supported on the shelf. In addition, it is desirable to provide an adjustable retainer assembly which can be selectively incorporated into new refrigerators or readily retrofitted onto existing refrigerator door shelving arrangements.